Ben Balser | Motion's Write On behavior lets you draw a line, then have that line "write" onto the screen, as if you were drawing it live with a pen. This can be really artistic if you use the technique with a Wacom. We'll look at the ins and outs of how this trick works and how to manipulate it in your projects.

Ben Balser | I'm very impressed with the image quality in HD Monitor Pro, as well as its ability to zoom in and move around the zoomed image as well. The supplied overlays are also very professional and useful grid lines, such as action safe, title safe, rule of thirds, center crosshair, and alignment. HD Monitor Pro is a very complete package. With a MacBook Pro it could help take your production up a notch. You won't be using this for run-and-gun events. But if you're doing film-type work, TV spots, legal depositions, and the like, it could be a very practical and productive tool.

Ben Balser | It seems as though more and more of us are shooting with multiple different cameras and trying to mix them in post. So this month I'm going to look at some features in Color that make bringing consistency to footage from disparate sources much easier and much faster, allowing the colorist more creative time and less technical time.

Ben Balser | Pulling keys is usually a royal pain, especially if you're working with footage that someone else shot. The lighting isn't right, the key isn't simple, garbage mattes have to be keyframed, and spill filters have to be tweaked. It was a lot of work—until now. Phyx Keyer, a new keying plug-in that runs on the FxFactory engine, is a great bargain and a very well-developed set of useful and easy-to-use filters that are effective and fast.

Ben Balser | This month we'll explore how to do voice-over (VO) work in Final Cut Studio, from some hardware advice to the actual software workflow. We'll start with some really basic notes about hardware, then move on to actual recording in the latest versions of Final Cut Studio and Soundtrack Pro.

Ben Balser | Keeping media organized and close at hand and finding specific pieces of media with specific content has always been a challenge.Cataloging your content is not enough; you have to be able to index it and search it in some meaningful way. To address this issue, AV3 Software has introduced Get, an application that actually searches your video media, indexes it, and allows you to perform searches for words based on phonetics., allowing for more accuracy.

Ben Balser | Have you ever wondered how to create the "Miniature" effect thart's currently holding sway in the production world, the effect tyat makes your footage look like it was shot with miniature models and animated, sort of like the opening sequence to Mister Rodgers' Neighborhood, when the camera dollied through the tiny model town during the opening credits? Here's how it works in Motion and Final Cut Pro, plus a quick look at how to do it with stills in Aperture and Photoshop.

Ben Balser | This month we'll look at the workflow for ingesting and editing Canon DSLR footage in Final Cut Studio, since Canon has a released an FCP plug-in for the Log & transfer window. But there's more than one way to go about ingesting this footage into FCP in a format that lends itself to fast, easy editing.

Ben Balser | MediaShare isn't as powerful as a full-fledged asset management and automation application such as Final Cut Server, which you'd be spending a lot more money on to set up and implement. MediaShare is a smaller system; it's easier to implement, and it's geared toward smaller operations or studios that need some form of cloud-based collaboration tool or a cloud-based review-and-approval tool in its most basic form.

Ben Balser | In Final Cut Studio 3, there is a new Share option under the File menu in Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor. This month's Cut Lines lays out an easy way to create a custom export preset, designed for your own specific needs, that will show up in the Share window for fast, easy export and publishing.

Ben Balser | In this installment of Cut Lines, I'll show you how to create video Favorites in Final Cut Studio and access them quickly, to help speed up your editing process, making it more enjoyable, productive, and profitable.

Ben Balser | This month we'll look at the four brand new speed controls in Final Cut Pro 7. Using these four resources together cam help you achieve complex speed changes and ramp them up quickly and easily.

Ben Balser | This month we'll look at the four brand new speed controls in Final Cut Pro 7. Using these four resources together cam help you achieve complex speed changes and ramp them up quickly and easily.

Ben Balser | This month, I'll show you how to use Final Cut Pro's Replace Edit tool as well as demonstrate some cool tricks you can do with Replace Edit when you combine it with other handy tools that will help you change out and clean up your edits quickly.

Ben Balser | This month, I'll show you how to use Final Cut Pro's Replace Edit tool as well as demonstrate some cool tricks you can do with Replace Edit when you combine it with other handy tools that will help you change out and clean up your edits quickly.

Ben Balser | Final Cut Studio 2009, the long-anticipated new release of Apple's eminent postproduction suite, delivers no major overhaul of anything, just a few little touches applied to most of the applications that can save you a ton of time during your postproduction process. Although none of the new features, taken by themselves, represent anything mind-blowing, together they make for a faster, easier workflow that will save you a lot of time.

Ben Balser | Final Cut Studio 2009, the long-anticipated new release of Apple's eminent postproduction suite, delivers no major overhaul of anything, just a few little touches applied to most of the applications that can save you a ton of time during your postproduction process. Although none of the new features, taken by themselves, represent anything mind-blowing, together they make for a faster, easier workflow that will save you a lot of time.

Ben Balser | This month we'll look at professional, efficient editing workflow. I'll show a proven workflow in Final Cut Pro that will cut your editing time, make your editing easier, and help you get more refined edits, giving you a better product to deliver to your clients.

Ben Balser | CoreMelt is definitely moving beyond the confines of the FxFactory model, and its new V2 generation of FCP plug-ins is amazing. I'm using them all now—not just the color correction tools but transitions, generators, etc.—and I'm really impressed. These guys are really on target and seem to be sticking to useful, practical plug-ins rather than just developing a bunch of fancy-looking stuff that has no real-world applicability.

Ben Balser | EditMule has three utility apps that work with FCP to make our lives as editors much easier, picking up the slack in three areas where FCP is lacking: assigning Scratch Disk settings on a per-project basis; collapsing Sequences to remove unnecessary tracks; and removing a specific filter, or filters, from a specific Sequence.

Ben Balser | Here we explore Final Cut Pro's track controls, teaching readers how to quickly and easily manage tracks and content, cutting down on the time they spend placing content, and increasing the time they have to be creative.

Ben Balser | DVDxDV's Veescope line, which started with the Veescope Live software-based field monitor, now consists of four tools: Veescope Live, Veescope Hub, Veescope Key, and Veescope Signals. I have found all four of these software products to be worth the price, reliable, and high quality.

Ben Balser | This month we'll look at exporting your Final Cut Pro Sequence into an H.264 file for the internet. We'll take you through three methods of doing this that are not difficult, starting with the easiest first.

Ben Balser | Is Final Cut Server for everyone? In a nutshell, no. A one- or two-person shop would do better to manually create a folder structure on a hard drive and use Adobe Bridge to manage its assets. But for mid-size and larger studios, broadcast stations, and environments where you have multiple people doing different jobs on multiple projects, FCSvr can be a huge timesaver and organizer. It's powerful, flexible, and really nice for a version one release.

Ben Balser | In constant speed time remapping, we have only two keyframes: one at the In Point and one at the Out Point of the clip. Both are "corner" keyframes, which means they are angles with no Bezier adjustment abilities. The whole clip moves at one "constant" speed—no changes, simple as that. Also, with constant speed changes, the duration of our clip in the Timeline window will change accordingly. With variable speed remapping, we can have many keyframes throughout the clip, and each can be a corner or a "smooth" keyframe.

Ben Balser | In Part 1 of our two-part tutorial on Time Remapping--speeding up or slowing down a clip or a section of a clip--we'll look at Constant Speed Remapping and its mechanics in FCP so that you more fully understand why your results look the way they do.

Ben Balser | In this installment of Cut Lines, we look at a growing trend among Final Cut users: utilizing Keynote--the iWork application designed for slideshow-model presentations--as a quick-and-easy motion graphics tool for creating DVD backgrounds.

Ben Balser | For those that produce multicamera live-switched events, the MCSDI-1 can boost you to uncompressed signals from lower-priced cameras, increasing your final product's quality, and decreasing your overhead. A clear winner for those that do this kind of work!

Ben Balser | Apple's Compressor application has always been a workhorse for video compression and transcoding. In this edition of Cut Lines, we'll take a brief walk through Compressor 3 to see just how easy it is to prepare your video projects for delivery to multiple platforms.

In this video tutorial, EventDV Moving Picture columnist Jan Ozer explains how you can stabilize your video effectively and efficiently with proDAD Mercalli using a host of well-chosen presets and more.

Ben Balser | In Part 3 of our motion graphics crash course, we'll transform our 3D animated titles into DVD menus, add transitions, and complete the project we started with LiveType in Part 1 and Motion in Part 2.

Ben Balser | If you do corporate work, serious sports shooting, indie filmmaking, and the like, Panasonic's HPX500 is an awesome camera to use. Great color depth, detail, improved depth-of-field, and ease/flexibility of control, along with the wide flexibility of recording formats, make it very worth its price.

Ben Balser | This month I'll present part 1 of a 3-part tutorial showing you how to create very dynamic titles with Final Cut Studio 2. In part 1, we'll start by using LiveType, along with photos from your wedding or event video, to create dynamic introduction clips.

Ben Balser | Here we take a detailed look at Veescope Live, HD Monitor, and ScopeBox, three of the most practical video production software products on the market for the Mac platform. These software production field monitors serve the same purpose in the Mac arena as Adobe OnLocation.

Ben Balser | Final Cut Pro 6 is the most solid and stable major upgrade for an application I've ever seen. Here we look at enhancements and improvements in the new version of Apple's pro NLE, including the open-format timeline, surround sound, automatic conforming and scaling, the smoothcam filter, ProRes 422, and more.

Ben Balser | The dv MultiRigPro is a usable, well manufactured, intelligently designed support system built with top-quality materials. It's easy to configure and adaptable to a range of configurations and shooting styles, and will keep you comfortable and flexible through a long day of shooting. If you do a lot of handheld work or run-and-gun shooting, this is a product worth a serious look.

Ben Balser | Just because your system has the horsepower to edit HDV and your NLE can capture and manipulate HDV source files doesn't mean it will all work smoothly right out of the gate. One of the first things you'll have to do to work with HDV footage is decide whether you'll use an intermediate codec, or edit it natively, which can br tricky, for reasons we'll explore in this article.

Ben Balser | Need to balance or sweeten the audio for a multiclip video, using audio drawn from multiple sources? If you're working in Final Cut Studio, Soundtrack Pro's Multitrack interface is the answer, and here's your roundtrip tour.

Ben Balser | The VX2000 and PD170 may be the kings of wedding videography, But for industrial and commercial work, they don’t hold a candle to the Panasonic HVX200, a “digital film” camera at a price that independent producers can afford. Adding a compatible, high-capacity DDR like the FS-100 offers even more versatility.

Ben Balser | Multiclip editing of long shoots like wedding ceremonies can be a stick problem. FCP's Multiclip editing interface is a fantastic and very easy-to-use tool, and it can dramatically reduce your editing time.

Ben Balser | Cinekinetic's CineSaddle is a super heavy-duty beanbag made for video/film cameras. It's a storage and support system in one that's got pockets for everything, and enables videographers to get shots they can't get with any other support device.

Ben Balser | This month in our ongoing series of Final Cut Pro tutorials we'll look at an example of a timesaving workflow for capturing wedding and event footage, and how to use this to set up a very flexible and powerful editing environment. As always, these methods can help you save time during the postproduction phase of work on your project.

Ben Balser | In this month's installment of our ongoing series of Final Cut Pro tutorials, we look at the four basic edit trim tools in FCP that, once mastered, can cut your editing time by a good amount.

Ben Balser | CUT LINES, a new monthly series of Final Cut Pro tutorials, will help you use FCP more efficiently. Occasionally we'll look at other applications that enhance the Final Cut workflow, but mostly we'll focus on FCP itself.